How to Speed Up Joomla for Better Website Performance

As a Joomla website owner, you may have thought a lot on how to make the site different from others so as to beat all competitors. In fact, fast loading speed is the key to achieve that goal, which brings visitors a better user experience because they don’t need to wait for a long time to load a web page. A website with fast accessing speed is more likely to be ranked higher since the search engines like Google value speed much.

For many people regarding the site speed as the first consideration, we make this guide to tell you how to speed up Joomla for better website performance, which mainly focuses on the following 6 points.

Is Your Joomla Hosting Provider Powerful Enough?

A good Joomla hosting provider can be a part of your success for it is able to deliver high level of reliability and fast speed to the hosted websites. When choosing a hosting provider, be sure to keep in mind that robust web servers, 24/7 network monitoring and cutting-edge technologies are used to power the data centers.

And also, based on thousands of reviews on the Internet, you can have a rough idea about the uptime record and accessing speed of most web hosts so as to pick out one of the most suitable one to fit your needs. To make it easier, we have investigated over 100 hosting companies in the industry and finally select the following three fastest Joomla hosting providers.

Keep Everything Updated

Always keep your Joomla core, extensions, and themes staying up-to-date. As each update achieves some code optimizations, the new version can always work better than the old version. To be honest, the changes between the versions are small, but the final effect on the loading speed can be huge.

To do this, you only need to make use of your Joomla dashboard. Generally, Joomla 3.x will check for the new version available automatically, and notify you about this in the administration area. Once you see the message, simply click the link without hesitation to go for the Joomla upgrade page.

After locating to the right page, you only need to click the button of “install the update”, and wait for a while to get the upgrade completion notification.

In terms of the update of extensions and themes, you can go for the Extension Manager within the dashboard. Once getting into this manager, you can find an Update option in the left-hand column. Then, you can click that button and see a list of extensions that can be updated. After checking the options yon want to update, you only need to click the Update button in the left-top area of the whole page.

Enable Caching

Enabling Joomla caching can boost the speed for webpage loading to a large extent. This practice can transfer the webpage to a HTML file that is static and light, meaning that the next time people view your pages, they don’t need to wait a long time for the data fetching and downloading.

There is a default plugin built with Joomla core that is called System-Cache. Generally, it is disabled, so the first thing you need to do is to enable it. To do it, simply go to the Plugin Manager of the Joomla dashboard and type “cache” into the search box. After finding the target, change the status from Disable to Enable.

The next thing is to turn on the conservative caching. You can do this from Joomla dashboard < System < Global Configuration < System. After finding the cache settings within this system page, you need to click the drop down menu of the Cache tab, and choose to enable the conservative caching. Upon configuration, don’t forget to click the Save button.

Pay Attention to Compression

Many webmasters have realized the importance of image compression to improve the performance of their websites. After all, an image featuring a small consumes fewer time for loading and downloading than a large image. In this case, many people compress the sizes of their pictures before adding to the website using some useful compression tools.

In fact, in addition to the image compression, the webpage compression is also important. Joomla allows you to achieve this with its build-in function. From dashboard > System > Global Configuration > Servers, you can find a page compression option. Simply turn on this function and save the settings.

Consider Utilizing Joomla Extensions

On Joomla.org, you can find whatever you want from the thousands of extensions, among which Website Preloader, JCH Optimize, Inceptive Smooth Preloader and ScriptMerge are the best recommendations for you. They are the convenient and fast methods to speed up Joomla website.

Take the JCH Optimize as an example. This extension specializes in speeding up Joomla by combining the external JavaScript and CSS files into one so as to reduce the use of http requests. Besides, the background images and gzip aggregated files are optimized effectively as well.

Minimize the Image Size

Image makes a web page vivid and attractive to turn down a rigid looking. Some webmasters never care about the image size and quantity so that make an adverse effect to the website. In fact, large sized images are hard to be loaded in a short time so that people have to spend a lot of time downloading each image. Thus, set the image size properly is the thing to do just around the corner.

Some Other Methods

The above mentioned ways for website performance improvement is exclusively for Joomla powered website. Besides them, there are also some other common methods used to speed up the webpage loading.

Make use of CDN – There are a lot of reliable CDN providers available like MaxCDN, shortening the distribution distance between your content and readers significantly.

How to Use

The site is designed for Joomlaers who are looking for joomla-friendly web hosting at an affordable price.

For the simple choice, I recommend you referring to the section "Overall" at the bottom of the table above, select the preference on the ranking of main aspects of a web host for Joomla, and click the "visit" button to claim the best discounts.

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